I can still remember my first day as the fashion editor on Woman’s Own. It was 1953, and I was 20. I wore a grey suit made of Yorkshire cloth, a silk shirt, gloves and a green pill-box hat – we always wore hats in those days. Before moving to London for the job, I was still living with my parents in Yorkshire. My life was about to change completely.

The Woman’s Own offices were just off the Strand – not quite Fleet Street, which was my ultimate ambition, but still central London ­– and filled with the sound of typewriters and phones ringing, and people smoking – everyone smoked, except me. A tea trolley came around regularly.

I am very ambitious. Even today, I get up at 5am to start working at my typewriter. But in the Fifties, for a woman to be so ambitious was unusual. My mother wanted exactly what all mothers wanted for their daughters back then: to marry and have children. But I was also a much-loved only child, and she gave me the confidence to believe I could do anything.

The television series The Hour, which starts again next month, is set in a Fifties newsroom. It is based on the life of the BBC producer Grace Wyndham Goldie and depicts what it was like to be a working woman in a man’s world. The Fifties were an interesting time in Britain, post-war but before the Swinging Sixties. We were the first generation of career women, and I can understand why women today are fascinated with the unique environment in which we worked.

I had left school at 15 for a job in the typing pool of the Yorkshire Evening Post. Of course, I didn’t want to be a typist. Instead, I wanted to write – I have been writing since the age of 10. I used to drop stories on the sub-editor’s desk, and eventually managed to get them in the paper. One day, the accounts department said, “Who’s this Barbara Taylor, we want to pay her. Is she a stringer? Oh, she’s a typist!” That’s how I got discovered.

Six months later, I became a reporter – and the only woman in the newsroom. It was a most unusual situation: me, a 16-year-old girl surrounded by tough North Country newspapermen. I wasn’t snubbed by them but they were certainly a bit wary at first. Much later, Keith Waterhouse, who had a desk adjoining mine and became a great friend, said: “When you started, we thought the editor had sent you in as a spy!”

By the time I was 18, I was the women’s editor. The editor said, we can’t give you a raise but we can give you this job. There were only a handful of women in the office but it wasn’t cliquey. It was certainly less competitive as there weren’t that many of us around, so we were nicer to each other and supportive. There was also more of a fresh innocence about young women working on newspapers because we had been exposed to so much less. We were all so young and naïve.

The women’s editor on the Yorkshire Evening Post before me had moved to London to work on Woman’s Own. One day the magazine called me out of the blue: we’re looking for a fashion editor, are you interested? Of course! My great ambition had always been Fleet Street – and therefore London.

The Woman’s Own editor, Joanna Chase, was like a cuddly aunt, and asked if my mother would let me work in London. She did, but it must have been hard for her. She came to London with me and we found a small flat in Belsize Park, which my parents paid for because I wasn’t earning very much – £12 a week. She stayed for 10 days and then returned to Yorkshire.

My job involved writing for the fashion pages, going to fashion shows or a showroom in the afternoon, and organising shoots. We had a studio in the office. Someone called Roger Moore once modelled sweaters for us. I remember thinking, “He looks dishy!”

My copy was a snapshot of the time. In the winter of 1953, I wrote that “Coats will be bunchy, short and heavy,” perhaps with a hood, “making a wonderful frame for the face and proof against the roughest weather.” Meanwhile, “the smartest girl at the party will be wearing wool… this is the best news for every girl who has shivered on a draughty dance floor – wool is now high fashion.”

My advice came from my love of clothes, something I still have now. These days, fashion editors will have gone to college. I think I benefited from not having professional training, though, as I did things my own way. I have always been able to identify with women and know what they want. I have a sense of the common touch.

At Woman’s Own, they created a byline name for the fashion editor, and one for the beauty editor, and the women who did that job wrote under that name. It was quite common at the time. I was “Suzanne Grey”. The beauty editor, Patricia Lewis, wrote under the name “Diana Day”. I did mind, of course, but I wanted to be there so I just got on with it.

Still, after a year I felt frustrated. The managing editor of the publishing group would change our pages at the last minute, even if there was nothing wrong with them, which meant we were often working until 10pm. All that hard work for nothing.

One day I snapped. I got very upset, threw my typewriter onto the wooden floor, and said I had to go out and get some fresh air. I left Patricia on the floor picking up my typewriter, went into a phone booth and called Reg, the assistant editor at the London Evening News, who I had met one evening when I was out with Patricia at a press screening.

I told him I wanted to leave. He said, “Come down and see me.” I said, “When?” He said, “Now!” I got a new job that afternoon.

At heart, I am a newspaper woman. I was so happy to be back in a newsroom and hear the clatter of typewriters and tickertape and be at the centre of the world. I liked reporting, going out in a dirty old trench coat. I loved every minute.

Newspapers at that time were known for their drinking culture. When I left the typing pool and became a journalist at the Yorkshire Evening Post, for instance, I was taken to the pub by the news editor and some of my colleagues. I was told, “Now you’re a junior reporter, we’re going to take you out for a drink and initiate you into the newsroom. Somebody will buy a round, and then you buy a round, and then you leave.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want you to become one of the boys.”

I thought that was very protective and sweet; I didn’t mind being considered different “from the boys”. The news editor was an older man and he didn’t want me to start drinking in pubs. I had a shandy, bought a round, and then I left.

Did any of the men hit on me? Not that much – we were there to get out a paper, and we were working hard. I was very pretty but I was also very serious-minded, and men picked up on that quickly. I had serious intentions of making it as a journalist. And when you’re very ambitious, I’m afraid it’s off-putting to some men. I suppose I was a bit of a goody two-shoes, too, always worried about my work. I still am, and I tell people I don’t do lunch. And I don’t like to be interrupted.

I stayed at the London Evening News for two or so years before I started seriously writing books. But I learnt a lot about writing from being a journalist. I’ll stick up for journalists, always. We bring the truth. We can’t have censorship, I’m very much against that.

I’m not sure working as a woman in the Fifties meant you had to be tougher. Every woman has to be tough. Tough doesn’t mean hard, it means resilient. I need to be tough about my work and tough with myself. I never had children – I had two miscarriages and then didn’t get pregnant again. But anyway, I wanted a career; it was something that shaped me. I don’t think having children would have stopped me.

After my mother died in 1981, I was going through her papers – my father had died five weeks earlier, incidentally, if you can imagine that for an only child – and I found her diaries. One of her entries was from the day we had gone down to London together after I had accepted the job at Woman’s Own. When she had come back to Yorkshire, she wrote, “I left Barbara in London today and all the sunshine has gone out of my life.”

It was a tribute to her that she understood this terrible ambition I had ­– and that she had let me pursue it.

 Barbara Taylor Bradford’s new novel, 'Secrets From the Past’ (Harper Collins, £14.99) is published on February 28th, and is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books at £12.99 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visitbooks.telegraph.co.uk